Flea Yatsenko
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Posts posted by Flea Yatsenko
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I've been selling for a long time. One thing I've noticed is when things aren't so healthy with the pipeline between a customer buying something and actually getting it, weird things start to happen.
The last few days, I've noticed delayed emails for sale confirmations. I usually keep my phone glued to my side and I keep a good eye on things. Delayed emails (yes, I check spam folder and I actually check on multiple devices to make sure it's not one device acting up) are a common thing I've noticed when the website or inventory servers are having issues.
I don't think you're alone in noticing something odd. To be honest, things have been a little abnormal for me and a few other merchants as well ever since last June. it does seem like the last few weeks things have been getting even worse somehow.
The thing about SL when it gets like this, I've noticed, is that it doesn't affect everyone. Some people don't get affected at all and some get massively affected. I think it has a lot to do with how old a lot of the SL codebase is. Those sort of bugs that affect certain groups of people but not others are the absolute worst to deal with, mainly because there's something unique they're doing or unique to their set up that isn't universal between other users.
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I got to play around with it for a few minutes. I like where it's headed but it seems like there's some room for improvement. I sort of feel like it'd be nice to have the option the in "MARKETPLACE LISTINGS" window to create a new folder. It seems you want to keep more than one copy of a build on hand, so I want to move a copy of the item to my marketplace listings. If I could make folders, I could paste other things into that folder.
I'll probably make a JIRA soon. I'm still really impressed with the performance of sending items to the website.
It might be a good idea to update the merchant log in page on the marketplace website after you log in to see your store. I don't have any analytics data (obviously) but I would assume that gets more traffic than the merchant forums. At least, if you're still looking for feedback.
Will you have a public beta of an importer tool from the old system? Or is it all going to be done on your end?
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I don't think this warrants its own Jira yet, but it's something I want to bring up.
It doesn't seem like a folder hierarchy tree-view is a good way to manage things. From playing with VMM a bit, it appears as though you have one level of folder for all of your products, below that, you have specific products, and then below that level, you have specific versions. A tree-view folder hierarchy implies that the different levels don't matter. I.E. there is no need for a parent-child relationship between folders. And from my playing with it, it appears there is.
Example is I created a large folder of objects and dragged it directly into the listings window. It ended up dropping in a few items, picking a random item and making that the name of a folder, and then putting objects in that folder. I tried two times and each time, the item for the folder for everything to go into was a random object in the list of objects.
So I would have
- Marketplace Listings
- ---Folder I dragged into Marketplace Listings folder in Marketplace Listings window
- --- --- random folder name from available objects
- --- --- --- Objects
I fixed it by setting things up as
- Product Name
- --- Product Version
- --- --- Objects
and dragging that to the window. And it worked reliably. It feels like I am doing this wrong, but the interface doesn't make it overly explicit that that's how it should be done. You do it wrong and it looks like the thing doesn't work properly, because there's nothing to guide the user on what to do and there's no meaningful error messages to indicated you've done something wrong. The only visible clue I had was that the version folder thing had lines on the folder icon and the others didn't.
It feels like the interface isn't clear enough on what you should be doing. It would be more convenient and more clear if you just had a textbox where you typed in the name of the listing, and then dragged folders full of items into an area after that listing has been selected, and then right click to activate that folder as current version of the listing.
I guess another way to explain my issue with this interface design is that you're using the same widgets to perform several actions: create listing, activate item, and edit listing. And this widget is a tree-view where you're supposed to just know that the top layer is a folder that gets listing folders added to it while the listing folders gets the folders full of content to list.
It's vague and confusing. I really don't think tree-view is the way to go about this. I tried to make a mock up in qt designer since it's quicker than gimp or photoshop, but it's difficult to get across properly.
But as a positive, I am really happy besides the interface. Normally it can take a few minutes for an item to show up on marketplace website when I use merchant outbox, and VMM was instant, even with a large folder. Sometimes with merchant outbox, it can take 10 minutes or more for my object to show up in the unassociated group. I think that clearing up interface issues is the current problem. Performance of this new system was really surprising to me in a good way. I am looking forward to what happens after the shift.
I will say, though, that the initial failure to create folders properly leaves me concerned about how the automatic importing will go. As it stands, I have my folders organized like
Object 1.0.0
Object 1.0.1
And it sounds like it should be
Object
--- 1.0.0
--- 1.0.1
to be compatible with the way VMM is right now. If it's the first way, dragging the main folder on will cause problems (at least it did for me).
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I saw a huge dip when that announcement was made. But I can't figure out if that slip was them hinting to us that SL is going to be limping along while they work on the new version and that's why things have been oddly slow or if the announcement scared people off of SL.
I sell some consumer things and some builder's kits. The kits have been doing pretty well, but the consumer stuff is a little slow. I think when SL gets slow it's because the more casual non-builders leave and the more dedicated users are buying things to build.
There was a big surge in August for me. So I don't know if the issue with things being a lot slower this time of the year than last year is a social problem or a technological one. I've been keeping records for a good two years and I noticed some months just end up looking like huge outliers for some reason. Oddly enough it seems like for all the times of good sales there is going to be times of really bad sales. And the last several months before June were really good to me.
Personally I think something got massively foobarred with the current backend of marketplace and that's why they're redoing it. I hope something along the lines of June and those announcements, SLMP team decided to make an SLMP compatible with SL 1.0 and SL 2.0 and they just decided to trash the old system and limp it along until the new one can come out. That's just being optimistic though. But I'm trying to wrap my head around why they would be redoing the backend of SLMP when it's about have a new service show up. The only good conclusion I came up with was that they're going to make a new system compatible with both services (at least on the backend) and they're redoing all of this SLMP stuff for SL 2.0, but still giving the upgrades to SL 1.0. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me to redo something in a product that's going to only be focused on for a year. I could be wrong though.
If you ask me, I think LL just took a lot of people off of SLMP maintenance and put them on making the new system. I noticed lots of weird things since June, like refreshing transaction history and getting 500 errors from the web server. Just poking around transaction history page and stuff there's a lot of odd errors. And all it takes is one error page when trying to check out for people to run away and not risk it. When you're dealing with real money and there's a chance it's just going to get thrown away, you get real careful.
If anyone else has any theories I'd like to hear them. I've been talking this over with others and trying to figure things out. But seeing a big drop off in June seems to be pretty commonplace from the people I've talked to about it.
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I was under the impression that the way things are currently setup is like this
Create object in SL -> send to merchant outbox -> assets get hosted on SLMP inventory server
So you have two copies of what you have listed, one in SL and another in the SLMP server
So when you buy something off SLMP, it has to go
SLMP website -> SLMP inventory server -> SL inventory server
I thought the point of this was to remove the SLMP inventory server completely to remove a step in transfering items to customers. So it would look like
Create object in SL -> store in SL Inventory
And ordering would be
SLMP website -> SL inventory server
From a technology standpoint, I would assume the website would track how many items are left and it wouldn't push the transaction from you to the customer if the quantity available is not enough to complete the transaction.
Shifting from SLMP inventory server to SL inventory server is going to really help speed up deliveries and make them a lot more reliable. SLMP has basically gone from:
Unstable LSL scripts that depend on simulator and LSL scripts to distribute inventory
SLMP inventory server that distributes inventory
And latest version will skip SLMP inventory server completely and just let SLMP inventory transactions skip directly from user to user without jumping through different servers.
LL has not made a big deal about this, but I think it is the largest reason for them to abandon the current system. It's going to remove a significant point of failure between sending things from SLMP and getting them from SLMP to customers.
The current system is very convoluted. Why do you need another server to handle transfering something that will stay on the same server anyways?
This has potential to fix a lot of things merchants complain about but LL is too nervous to even address.
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I hope for this as well. It means that content creators are solely responsible for the appearance of the avatar and there's no longer a need to rely on LL to release avatar updates. As it stands right now, any content creators who want to make avatars basically have to hide the default avatar and then throw something over what exists already. Once you get out of humanoid shapes, you're in trouble.
Not to mention custom skeletons open up possibilities like animated body parts. That would be a game changer from XXX market to people who want neko cat ears.
I would hope we would see something along the lines of a default avatar and skeleton provided. Then, animation vendors would make animations for the default skeleton. And then, people who make avatars would want to use the default skeleton as often as possible to have the most amount of animations provided for that avatar.
And then it still leaves the possibility open of allowing custom animations and custom skeletons to be added. I don't see it getting horribly fragmented. I have no doubt someone will try and lock people down into proprietary avatars and animations, but that's going to be a very difficult battle to have to fight against all the animation vendors who are designed for a default avatar.
At least, those are my thoughts on things. It seems like some of this is being taken too hard again. Custom skeletons doesn't mean that we won't have a default avatar that is primarily designed around. It means that we will have a default avatar with the option of using custom skeletons and animations.
If there is no default avatar, skeleton, and animations, people will just log into SL 2.0 as clouds until they buy things...
I'm just throwing out baseless conjecture at this point, but if Ebbe is reading hopefully he can either give us hints that something like this is coming or that my ideas could go toward SL 2.0 if they haven't been thought of already.
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I am looking at it along the lines of throwing something older out and having something newer come along that learns from the mistakes of previous projects.
Look at something like Windows. I've made this point elsewhere, but Microsoft got rid of 16-bit application support in 64-bit Windows. Yet 64-bit Windows 7 is a pretty decent OS. But you wouldn't be there if MS made a huge effort to make sure those 16-bit applications still worked on 64-bit Windows.
It's a fact that software that is developed on top of software that people don't understand will turn out poorly. SL 2.0 is LL starting over with people who understand completely what the new code does.
Meaning that there's more than likely been a lot of things LL has wanted to add for us but couldn't because it wasn't technically feasible.
And as for content, I already asked Ebbe in this thread (and he responded), and LL is going to do whatever they can to ensure that as much content as possible can be brought over. There seems to be this massive knee jerk reaction and people are thinking that because of an upgrade, people are going to lose everything. You don't lose everything if you upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8 (and you're smart about it). I still have files in my "documents" folder in my Windows install from more than 10 years ago, because I've brought them with me from XP -> Vista -> 7, and each one had multiple fresh re-installs.
People do not understand how valuable the existing SL 1.0 content is to LL. Content is what makes SL good and LL won't throw that away for SL 2.0. Ebbe agreed with me 100% on it.
I am trying to think how I can explain this. But if LL releases SL 2.0, and absolutely no content can be transfered from SL 1.0, then there's no point in going with SL 2.0 as opposed to something else like High Fidelity, InWorldz, etc. However if LL makes it easy to bring SL 1.0 content to SL 2.0, then going to a competitor means you give up existing content in SL anyways. I asked Ebbe if he realized this and he agreed with me.
He is not good at explaining what is happening. He basically came out and said "we aren't making promises but we're going to do our best to make it as easy as possible to move to SL 2.0 and bring your content, friends, inventory etc, but there's going to be some things that would require us to not fix things that need to be fixed if we make sure everything can come over. We will do our best but some things just won't be able to make it." and everyone thought that mean "it's all over SL 2.0 won't have anything at all from SL 1.0 and everyone will have to start over from scratch!!!! ZOMG WE ARE DOOMED!~!! SL 1.0 FOR LYFE!!!"
I hate to sound rude but it seems like no one in this thread has ever ran their own start up or anything. I have had a few in my life, some successful, others not, but content is the most valuable asset you have as a start up. Your customers are second, because customers won't show up without content yet you need customers to consume content (so they are both extremely important, don't get me wrong, I'm not choosing one as important and one as not). LL throwing away all SL 1.0 content for SL 2.0, as far as business sense is concerned, is so ridiculously bad of a business decision that it would mean suicide and I can't even fathom it happening.I actually did have a (very short lived) start up that did very well for its short life. It had to be shut down and re-launched several times, and every time we beat out existing competitors hugely because we launched early and were in a really good position because we had tons of user content already, and other sites didn't. In fact, they had vastly nicer solutions to what I had yet we were more popular, because we had the content. A few times I had to just scrap things and start over again because I made huge mistakes. Mistakes that can't be patched out.
I realize this is winded but I understand what LL is doing and it's definitely needed. I don't blame Ebbe, it's not an easy thing to try and explain, but he could be doing it better IMO.
I suppose as one final effort, I'll fall back to the dreaded car analogy. Right now, SL 1.0 is a clunker, but it has all sorts of things we like in there, like a nice stereo and speakers. LL is basically offering us a new car, but telling us that they'll do their best to make sure you can bring that stereo with you. But they're saying that they can't make promises that everything will work. You might end up with the head unit working and front speakers, but no room for the subwoofer.
That's not a bad proposition and I would gladly invest in SL 2.0. In fact, I've already stated this elsewhere, but I plan on ensuring that my existing customers get what they paid for in SL 2.0 if/when they migrate. If LL doesn't provide the tools, I'll have to do it myself. But it is feasible for me to do this from an income standpoint and I want to ensure that my customers are happy. If anything, this attitude of being terrified of SL 2.0 is the worst thing anyone can do for their customers. You're basically telling them all that you have no interest or faith in the brand new car that's sitting in the driveway because your subwoofer and rear speakers don't fit in the new car and you can't bring them with.
If I get new tools and I get to actually upgrade my existing products as I move them to SL 2.0, I'd be even happier.
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I am thinking back to Direct Delivery. Overall the service works much better than Magic Boxes. It's far more reliable in my experience. But Marketplace still has several issues, and it is more than likely because lots of hacky solutions have been made to get it working on things that have been around for years. To be honest with you, DD has treated me very well and leaving Magic Boxes behind let me punch through a glass ceiling I could never get past, no matter how many new products I made. I basically switched to DD and watched my sales go crazy while I didn't even make anything new, advertise, etc.
I have faith in LL over this. You've got to remember that a large part of writing software is understanding existing code and writing new things that work well with the existing code. If what LL is trying to add relies on older code that's way too complex to understand, then it doesn't matter if you're actually a good programmer or not. You will write really good code that behaves very poorly with the existing code.
I would at the very least expect something that works very well for the intial burst. LL will need to do everything it can to keep the employees that helped develop the original SL 2.0 codebase around, because they will understand it completely. I can't even begin to fathom how much code is left in SL 1.0 that was written entirely by people who don't even work there anymore. I can also imagine a lot of Lindens looking at code and not having a clue what it does (it's not the Linden's fault, some code just works that way, specially if the people before you didn't write good code and comment), and then making guesses which leads to massive problems.
Having a team working on SL 2.0 for the next 5 years that completely understands how the SL 2.0 platform works will be revolutionary to the end user experience and you will see a lot of problems with SL 1.0 completely disappear, only due to the raw nature of having a team of programmers who understand what they are writing code for without having to make horrible guesses and not understanding existing code.
It look LL 4 hours to find out that a MySQL server that assigns IDs reached the upper bounds of IDs and couldn't generate any more. It is pretty easy to say "wow LL is incompetent, they couldn't find that problem for 4 hours!", but if you look at it more along the lines of "the old people who worked here 10 years ago made a huge noob mistake by not allocating enough memory for the main IDs or using the wrong type of ID key and they are all gone now." and then imagining people who know better and wouldn't expect such a mistake to be made while trying to find a mistake like that, you give LL a little more sympathy.
However I am probably a little biased. I have managed extremely large PHP projects by myself in the past, so I understand how these sort of things work.
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I personally think this can't come fast enough. Building in SL is so tedious and unrealiable I developed in house tools to do the in world building for me.
SL is so broken that yesterday, I went to update my profile and I had to save it multiple times before it actually wrote to the database. This is the same infrastructure that is handling transactions for things I convert to real USD.
If content and people move to SL 2.0 and SL 2.0 is even remotely stable, SL 1.0 is going to wither away rapidly.
The way I see it is LL can either spend a ton of resources hobbling along on SL 1.0 or they can just start over with something better and use those resources to improve their features.
What would you rather have? An SL where Lindens spend their time fixing a broken MySQL Cluster and dealing with it not working half the time, or an SL where Lindens have a stable platform they've developed learning from what went wrong with the initial product and developing new features?
I am a patient person and SL 1.0 puts me at the end of my rope at times. Moving things only to see them spring back where they were, things randomly turning to Convex Hull from Prim, a convoluted permissions system that doesn't reliably tell you the permissions of something depending on if it's in your inventory or in world, etc. The fact that SL 1.0 hasn't imploded while it has all these problems is proof to me that people want SL very badly and will tolerate these sorts of things. But a large amount of people don't, and won't. And then you end up with new users who try and get into building, try rezzing a cube, see that it doesn't rez, try and rez more cubes, and then suddenly get 10 cubes. That's usually the point where people go "wow, what did I download this for again?" and never come back.
I have hopes that a more reliable and easy to use SL that actually engages new users would take off very well.
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This is what I felt would happen.
People heard "we aren't making promises about backwards compatibility" and took it as "LL is giving up on backwards compatibility completely."
I just want to hear from you, Ebbe, that you understand the value of existing content in SL and that you will do what is possible to keep products people have purchased while obviously drawing the line somewhere that certain things are too difficult to bring to SL 2.0.
Something along the lines of "Mono scripts will still work but LSL engine scripts won't." or "Mesh will work but sculpties won't." or "you can use existing animations with user created skeletons."
Just something along those lines. It doesn't even have to be concrete. But a lot of people seem to not understand how valuable a large amount of user generated content is and that (and I hope you agree with me on this) throwing away vast amounts of user content that other users like is a huge mistake, and that cleaning out existing content entirely would only put LL on level playing field with other virtual worlds.
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I've been looking for a general new SL thread and I haven't found one yet. I've been curious as to what's going to happen to us merchants. I understand that content won't be backwards compatible, but I don't know what implications that gives us.
Does it mean we just have to re-upload things? Or does it mean there's no more user created mesh?
I am a little concerned at the moment, I feel much like LL could completely do a lot of merchants in. But at the same time I think maybe LL will give us better tools. It seems like an SL replacement that was more intended to function as a game engine as opposed to a virtual world would be far better. Somewhere where creating your own FPS game on a server would be much more enjoyable. So I don't really know if the new SL will be amazing for content creators or an execution of their existence.
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Remember that blog post about LL saying that their database servers have serious issues?
They're trying to reduce the load on the database servers by not giving you as much information. You have two choices, either get more information and have reduced reliability or reduced information and increase reliability.
I get the feeling LL has just been adding features to websites (and probably backend SL stuff) without thinking of the consequences on other servers.
I would imagine LL will start consolidating things a little better. Notice how friends list is missing from transaction history? We are probably going to lose some features but it is for the goal of stabilizing the service a bit better.
As it stands, you can get transaction history of orders from
1. main account transaction history
2. order history on SLMP
3. transaction history of SLMP
All of these are eating resources that should be freed up to save LL resources so they can provide a more stable service.
LL needs a roadmap of what features they are going to cut to help improve the load on the database system so we can plan around what will be missing. Seeing missing digits for orders wouldn't be bad if we all had a month or so to work around what we knew was coming.
I'd personally be happy if they scraped a bunch of internal LL tools and just gave us all a more robust API so we could make better third party solutions.
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IIRC, SLMP is just a modified version of Spree FLOSS commerce platform that runs on RoR.
I am never very good at explaining this, but the basics of it is that it uses a programming language and platform called Ruby On Rails, and it's horrificially slow. Java can be 1000 time faster in searching large databases, and in fact that's exactly what Twitter found out after it abandoned Ruby on Rails due to its horrible performance.
The problem is that the people who don't actually program, like the managers, see Ruby on Rails and its short development time and how fast it is to set something up and they just see less hours of coding which means less money spent on the product development.
But Ruby on Rails doesn't scale. It's always been horrifically slow and it's just barely starting to catch up to other really slow web scripting languages and platforms, but it simply doesn't scale.
And when I say scale, I'm referring to the ability to support a large number of simulateous users. Ruby on Rails, the platform which SLMP runs on, is essentially designed for small, low traffic websites which aren't mean to gain significant amounts of users.
XStreet did it right, they used PHP. Yes, PHP is a mess of a language and it seems like it was almost designed to encourage you to write bad code, but it's fast. It powers Facebook and lots of other massive websites. And Facebook itself has its own PHP tools which can make PHP run extremely fast.
If you're trying to make a web application that can scale to a ton of users, you need technology like PHP + Postgres. If you're a management guy who wants to cut corners to make the quarterly report look great because you reduced opperating expenses by paying developers less, then Ruby on Rails is perfect.
The whole SLMP situation irks me to no end. XStreet website was great but Magic Boxes were kind of unreliable. So LL replaced it with Direct Delivery (which I'm a big fan of) and then got rid of the good website and replaced it with something awful.
SLMP is killing my sales. I have started to reset up in world purchases in my in world store, and I keep getting IMs from frusterated users who don't want to deal with SLMP being slow and useless yet want to buy products.
Marketplace being in the state its in is killing SL. SLMP is the gateway to the vast majority of content for Second Life. Every new user that signs up for SL while marketplace is not running right gets a first impression that the website's broken.
Something like 10 seconds to load a web page for a new user is 99.99999% going to kill any hopes of that user coming back. And I've seen SLMP take 45 seconds to load on a 100mbps internet connection where every other site I would go to loaded instantly.
I've been in SL for some time and from what I've seen, it's always been a pattern of user signs up, buys things, then does things with what they bought. You need to buy things in SL to be occupied, it's essentially a free 2 play game with microtransactions everywhere.
Just put this into perspective, imagine if Farmville, League of Legends, or TF2 store took a long time to load and was unreliable. Do you think they would all be as successful as they are?
I am really hoping they can fix it. I think fixing SLMP would fix a lot of other problems with the grid, like the retention rate for new users, which would drive up land purchases, drive up the economy, etc.
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You can test marketplace lag and get an objective answer to page performance by using something like http://tools.pingdom.com
I ran a test a few times, it seems hit or miss. A few weeks ago I was measuring 30 seconds or more to load marketplace.
What I'd really like to see is an A/B test done with existing marketplace design and then a really simple, sleek one that more resembles google home page. A simple search box, tools to search if you do some clicking, and that's the end of it. marketplace more closely resembles something like amazon right now.
What I am curious is if a lightweight, fast loading website would increase sales enough to make up for the lost income from selling advertisements. I have an odd feeling looking at my sales data and comparing them to how well the marketplace is loading that sales would increase significantly if marketplace was faster loading.
It seems like, specially with the inclusion of google ads on marketplace, that the SLMP website is only being looked at in a short range (I'm tired and can't think of the right word) perspective.
Marketplace is the primary gateway to the content of Second Life. Most other games would absolutely kill for the amount of content Second Life has. And yet LL's objective with SLMP seems to be to maximize profits on the page itself instead of using it as a tool to keep users engaged and to provide them with content to keep logging in after 30 days.
I've been hoping to see it transition from just a place for LL to push advertisements and charge for promotions into something where selling as many things as possible works out best for merchants because it ends up with more money in their pockets and it works better for LL because they can keep new users engaged in new content.
The fact that there are so many people who try Second Life and then leave saying "I didn't know what to do! It was empty and I didn't have anything" is sort of ridiculous when the main content repository is (nearing?) 3 million items.
Look at a game like League of Legends. People pay big money for skins becaue it's really easy to access. It's something you can just impulse buy. And comparing the amount of content in what you can do to an avatar in Second Life is massively larger than your options in a game like LoL.
Marketplace's sole purpose should be to make it as easy as possible for people to find what they are looking for as fast as possible. If you want to grab people's attention for impulse buys, that feature should be quarantined into a different section of the website. Sort of like how google has the "I'm feeling lucky" button.
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Is there any hope of LL marketplace team abandoning Ruby on Rails? Twitter saw a 1000x speedup in search by going to Java from RoR.
To put that into perspective, that's the same as going from 10ms to 10,000ms, or 10 seconds.
XStreet used PHP, and while it's an ugly language, it performs very well and has a large amount of utilities available for optimizing performance and caching things.
Try using a web page performance analyzer like http://www.webpagetest.org or http://tools.pingdom.com. The site performs horribly and that's not even using a search query.
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Firstoff, this is a great thread. I think I was one of the original people who came up with the idea that LL is making trouble for itself by claiming to own the stolen content from games that gets uploaded.
Right now, if LL wants to remove stolen content from the grid, they have to wait for a DCMA from the owner of the IP. I've done this personally and I know friends who have done it, most of the time, companies DON'T care that people are stealing content in SL and they can't be bothered to write a DCMA.
However, the people who get hurt the most from this are actually the content creators and LL itself. As a content creator, I must now compete in situations where it can take me 40+ hours to finish something, which I would normally sell for a few thousand L$, with someone who is just stealing similar content and selling it for L$5.
So obviously, that does hurt content creators. But how does it hurt LL? LL takes a cut off of every sale. They want the more expensive, high quality stuff to sell. Stolen content has created a race to the bottom of prices. It hurts content creators and it hurts LL's profits off of marketplace as well.
In regards to removing stolen content, however. Before, LL would have to wait until the IP owner showed up and contacted them and filed a DCMA. LL can now go, "hey, we know where you got that from and you don't have the rights to upload this and resell it, we're removing it."
As for LL being silent on the issue and implying that LL is doing something big like selling.
LL never talks to us. This is nothing out of the ordinary.
With the old TOS, LL was completely handcuffed when it came to people reporting content. If they removed it without getting a DCMA, IIRC people were saying LL would actually get in trouble for it. That problem is now gone. LL owns it now and if they think it's stolen (or they want it gone for whatever reason), they can actually remove it because it's theirs and they're free to use their property how they want to.
It's a lot of power given to LL and I don't think I've seen this point made. It's up to LL to use this for good and not evil, but considering LL runs off of user generated content, I don't see them intentionally using this for evil.
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There have been some people who have been claiming that SLMP gives products away for free. It might be related but I'm not making any accusations right now towards CTL.
Things have been wonky, for me at least, since the new payment system went into place. Last July was better than this one, last August better than this one, and now last September was way better than this one.
It is usually safe to assume that when LL or CTL announces some sort of change to SLMP, that it will have a swath of new bugs in the upcoming months. Then they fix them and then they break it again by adding new features or changing things.
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Maybe there was some truth to those ancient rumors of Microsoft buying Second Life?
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Second-Life-Linden-Lab-Mark-Kingdon-virtual-World-Xbox,11402.html
Metro GUI on SL! ITS HABBENING!
I would say that if you're a mesh or texture vendor, you could at least make your products difficult to alter in ways that customers aren't meant to alter (SL would probably be able to alter them how they want) and then place your logo somewhere. Then at least if LL takes it, everyone sees your name on your product and you're getting (kind of) free advertising.
It is kind of sad to say but I think MS would do a better job with SL. I am really tired of CTL announcing new features and then the day of deployment my sales drop 30% and don't recover for months.
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So, does this mean LL is claiming copyright to the stolen intellectual property that gets uploaded to SL? I was reading the CGTextures thread and I realized that this has basically turned people stealing mesh content and uploading it into, "some random guy is making a few bucks off of my work" to "LL says they own this and they're free to use it how they want, but LL is assuming it's created by the uploader and it's actually my work which I don't want in SL or to give LL free permission to use my goods however they like"
What effect do you think this is going to have on all that content that comes from other games? -
Another huge clue is that the quality of the advertisement images doesn't match the quality of the mesh product being sold. That's why I try and maintain a website for my goods that matches the style of my primary product images. It shows that I'm capable of building and I have control over what I'm doing. I'd encourage everyone else who is making original content to take steps outside of their actual products to assure customers that you'll stand by what you make and to give them confidence in you as a creator.
It seems a large number of the folks who rip content don't even have very good graphic design skills and they at best can throw text on an image, add some layer styles, and paste some other images they stole from some where else (and stealing images like that is just as bad as stealing mesh, someone worked hard to make those images and they didn't work hard for someone else to make money off of it). There are some people, no doubt, who are alright with photoshop who are selling stolen content but poor graphic design on advertisements coupled with very well done mesh is usually a clue.
A complex mesh item takes time to make. It also takes skill. No one in their right mind would spend 40+ hours on a piece of high quality mesh to sell it for 50 cents.
My concerns are that this stolen content losing value is going to drag a lot of actual content creators who make similar things down with it. I'm also concerned that eventually SL itself may be known as a place for content theives to go. Worst case scenario is that the stolen goods might become so well known that SL might just end up looking like some sort of cheap Gary's Mod knock-off where you're not limited to using Valve assets.
I wish I knew what LL was thinking. A part of me thinks they actually want this stolen content in here. I'm recalling some sort of post around here that was basically Humble telling all non-pro content creators "good-bye", but the part that worried me the most about his actual quote was that it (IIRC) was more to the effect of "we're releasing materials to get professional CONTENT in the game" and not creators.
Which to me kind of sounded much like they were hinting at they actually wanted to give people who steal content better tools to sell their stolen content as opposed to encouraging the types of mesh creators who bake their products because they know how to. Baking is a serious barrier to entry if you choose to do it, at the settings I use it still takes me a while, I have a 5ghz 8 core AMD CPU running a completely optimized version of Gentoo Linux with a completely optimized version of Blender and it will take several hours to bake something not overly large.
I just don't think it's very wise to be so lax about content theft, specially when the content is being stolen from an industry that does nothing but cries that piracy is killing their profits.
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CTL you really need to sit down and talk with the boss about the state of the marketplace. Rod has all these plans of wanting professional content and such in here, but people are only going to bring in that kind of content if they can reliably get paid for their work.
As it stands right now, turbosquid and the other sites are far more reliable when it comes to actually getting your money and providing a good experience for customers. The SLMP is all over the place, it has a bad reputation as unreliable.
Rod really, really needs to understand the importance of the market place. Quality content will keep users in Second Life, it'll drive numbers up everywhere.
I thought Rod would have realized that coming from EA he is moving from a business model of having to pay people to make DLC for their games and to have to pay folks to create content for their products, to Second Life where LL actually makes money off of people who create content for their game via encouraging users to invest in land to use that content and through commission through sales.
I had high hopes that Rod would have seen this and realized the importance of ensuring that Second Life had quality content that attracted quality developers which in turn attracted a large audience of people to play the game because of the quality content within Second Life.
Instead he has given us Patterns and such and has completely ignored things. The grid sits empty because people are not finding compelling reasons to stay logged in. They do not have the content to occupy themselves in SL.
Because of this people don't see the need for a sim, or to hang out in a certain place. Sims are expensive as it is, but when you sit down with an idea and you end up having to buy content from merchants to make it happen, and you have no confidence in the marketplace you're using to acquire that content, people just don't care as much about creating what they want in Second Life.
It really pains me as LL has basically made it extremely difficult to open up a competitor to SLMP given the massive convenience SLMP would offer over a traditional xstreet type of "pay a terminal and keep your account balance up.
The entire state of Second Life right now is bad. I'm simply trying to look at someone's picks right now and I keep getting a huge, pink scary error when I try and load the page.
The entire product needs to be brought to a level where it's at least reliable. I have serious doubts in everything myself as I see sales patterns that make no sense. I'll have the best days of the week end up on a Tuesday or Wednesday or something, and then have a horrible weekend. I'll have a great June and then make half as much in July.
Second Life is a great product, if it weren't people wouldn't put up with all the problems. But it needs to see a ton of quality changes before anything else happens. We need to see a feature freeze and commitment to fixing what is broken. Even if SLMP was fixed to be 100% reliable it's extremely painful to spend hundreds of dollars a month on something to have it constantly breaking with rez errors and stuff. I'd even be content with seeing features removed from SLMP in order to improve the reliability of actually finding products and getting them in world.
It's really easy to sit back and say that Second Life is going down, but the solution isn't as difficult as people seem to think. People have a massive intolerance for things not working or not being able to use things they paid for. That should be the #1 issue to address in Second Life right now. The fact that real money is being involved only makes things severely worse. It gets even worse when you have people depending on Second Life to make a living and confidence in the platform is so low that the vast majority of folks who provide content for this game have no faith things will ever get fixed.
Also, please start communicating with our customers on SLMP better. Changing the entire check out page is a huge, jarring change. People don't take well to massive, aburpt change at all, and it scares people when they are using real money.
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Sorry to bump an older thread, but I was wondering if people were still experiencing this. I still am, several hours to get an email and sales have been very slow in SLMP.
I noticed it began about the weekend where LL admitted they had to manually push transactions though and it hasn't stopped yet.I am on track to have the worst month of sales in a very long time, and traditionally this is my strongest point of the year.
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I've been having the same problem in Linux. I finally managed to install Funtoo properly and I thought I was the one messing everything up.
I get the crash in Firestorm, official viewer, official dev, and official beta viewer. Does anyone else know anything about this? I'd roll back to an older version of Second Life but I have a really, really good feeling that there's not a lot of people archiving old Linux versions.
Nella, if you can find an older version of Second Life, try installing that. If we're both having the same problem and we're on completely diffferent operating systems, it's probably something wrong with the viewer.
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Rodvik comes from a gaming company. He is not used to having to appreciate the content creators for his games, because it's just part of the plan.
SL needs merchants, because they create the content. The way LL treats merchants is appalling. I don't understand why they don't treat us better. If it weren't for us, the grid would be ruth, basic avatar hair, and library clothing items. All with Linden Trees and library housing.
I hope they change their tune very soon. If another virtual world comes along that appreciates its content creators, merchants are going to jump ship from SL extremely quickly.Not only is Second Life a platform that underappreciates its content creators, but they actually charge us to create content for their game. They charge per upload, take a commission, and of course you're more than likely going to have to pay them (probably indirectly through a land baron or such) for an in world presence.
It's pretty sad. I imagine if another virtual world comes out, that they would understand that without merchants, they end up with a world like cloud party where everyone looks the same, lives in the same houses, and it's very low contrast.
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Viewer-Managed Marketplace Beta
in Merchants
Posted
The reasoning behind moving marketplace inventory to SL inventory servers is to get rid of the redundency of having to store items in both the SL inventory server and the SLMP inventory server. It also reduced an entire hop with a transation which reduces the amount of possible areas things can go wrong.
With Direct Delivery, it goes a bit like this:
The new way with VMM is a little more efficient
There's a lot less to go wrong with the new system. In a way it's the best of magic boxes and direct delivery, where you can sell limited quantity items as well as there's no additional hop between another server like with Magic Boxes, but it has the perks of DD like not having to depend on an LSL script on a simulator.
However, the real reason I dropped by this thread, was I was hoping we could see the migration to VMM used to clean up the marketplace from older listings from merchants that have abandoned SL. There could simply be an email that says you have to opt in to move to VMM and if you don't, your listings will be unlisted and not automatically migrated after a certain timeframe, say a few months. Basically, just use this as a chance to see which users are still active and which are gone, and to reduce the amount of items clogging up search for users and clogging up servers for LL. If someone misses it, they could manually migrate and list again laster manually.